During a November 2012 Congressional hearing on autism before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dr. Coleen Boyle, the Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, gave evasive answers to lawmakers pressing her on this point. After considerable badgering, she finally stated,

Verstraeten found a dramatic link between mercury-containing hepatitis B vaccines and several neurological injuries including autism and prepared the study for publication. CDC shared Verstraeten’s analysis with the then four vaccine makers but kept it secret from the American public.

Burying the results

The world’s largest vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) then whisked Verstraeten off to a sinecure in Brussels and CDC handed his raw data to his CDC boss Frank DeStefano and another researcher, Robert Davis who served as a vaccine industry consultant.

Those two men tortured the data for 4 years, removing all unvaccinated children, to bury the autism signal before publishing a sanitized version purporting to exculpate the vaccine. The CDC then cut off public access to the VSD and to this day aggressively blocks any attempts by researchers to study health outcomes in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations.

Contemporary emails among CDC officials— obtained under the FOIA— and the transcripts from a secret 2000 meeting between government regulators and vaccine makers at Simpsonwood, Georgia, show HHS officials plotting to create phony studies to exonerate vaccines.

CDC officials hired a Scandanavian, Poul Thorsen, giving him $10 million to create a series of fraudulent reports from Denmark. Thorsen dutifully produced the predetermined results but allegedly stole at least $1 million of the grant from CDC.

He is now an international fugitive under Federal indictment and on HHS’s “Most Wanted” list (scroll down to see Thorsen). CDC continues to cite Thorsen’s studies as the bedrock for its claim that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Attempting to debunk the link

CDC officials Frank DeStefano and Coleen Boyle knew they needed to study an American population to convincingly debunk the vaccine/ autism link.

They believed it would be safe to study the MMR vaccine because the MMR did not contain thimerosal. They assigned senior scientist and CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, and three other researchers from the Immunization Safety Office to study the MMR vaccine in Georgia children.

Thompson worried about being dragged into another “circus” like the Verstraeten study. His bosses promised Thompson that this time there would be no mid-course shenanigans to bury unpleasant data. They would agree on protocols up front and stick to them no matter what the data revealed.

Nevertheless, when the data showed a shocking 364% increase in autism among African American boys given the MMR on time, Destefano ordered the four CDC scientists to destroy the damning information in large garbage cans. “I can’t believe we did what we did, but we did it”, recalls Thompson. That sanitized study is now cited in 97 subsequent publications as the proof that vaccines don’t cause autism.

“I have great shame now when I meet the parent of a child with autism because I have been part of the problem.”

Slide 12 shows the true results of Dr. Thompson’s original data.

Despite CDC’s efforts at suppression, independent scientists and research institutions (including UCLA) have managed to conduct and publish several additional vaccinated/unvaccinated studies since 1999. Those studies indicate high incidence of chronic diseases and brain and immune system injuries among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated cohorts. Some of those studies are summarize in this presentation.

This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc.

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